Berlin 2015 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 27: Posters: Complex Fluids and Soft Matter
BP 27.7: Poster
Dienstag, 17. März 2015, 14:00–16:00, Poster A
The role of detailed balance in chemically active droplets — •Rabea Seyboldt1, David Zwicker1,2, and Frank Jülicher1 — 1Max-Planck Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden — 2School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Liquid systems that undergo phase separation coarsen with time. One mechanism for coarsening is Ostwald ripening, where large droplets grow at the expense of smaller ones by diffusive fluxes. We are interested in situations in which Ostwald ripening is suppressed due to chemical reactions. We consider a system consisting of three chemical components in which reactions occur between the components. Reaction rates in general obey local detailed balance conditions. We focus on the case where two of the components phase-separate while the third component does not participate in phase separation but represents a reservoir that provides chemical free energy to the system. In this case, the system can be effectively described as a two component phase-separating system with broken detailed balance. In this case, many droplets can coexist with a stable stationary droplet size. Thus chemical reactions can suppress Ostwald ripening and stabilize active suspensions. Our work could be relevant to phase separation in biological cells where liquid-like structures such as centrosomes and germ granules coexist in the cytoplasm in presence of chemical reactions.